***UPDATE 10.04.13 BITCOINS ARE NOW #184 USD, WHEN I WROTE THIS ARTICLE IT WAS 30USD

[vimeo 63502573]

thinking about getting into Bitcoins.. Just some notes for myself..

Explain Bitcoins, Silk road and Tor networks.. Should be the first question asked in IT interviews! (cause it shows you are interested in technology and not just memorising brain dumps. ) (also demonstrates you have a hi-tech mind)

Bit coins is a Peer to Peer currency developed like many technology to over-come the inherent problems of “money”. i.e. open source..

Just google it and you will find allot of info.. Its kinda like the old Gold rush days, but your pick and shovel is a sophisticated hardware and software..

These slides pretty good background into bitcoins:

The good old days of bitcoin mining you needed a massive amount of computer rigged together, but now days the technology has evolved to CHIPS.. Check out this crazy rig

But, i dont wana do that, the new ASIC Chips are about the size coffee mug and are more powerful than the above.. So order my equipment and startred these notes. So the above rig can do 48 GHz, the new ASIC single chip can do 60 GHz..

So to put things in perspective as of this writing, the exchange rate for a single BITCOIN is at @ 15 USD..

So its a race to the ASIC mining kinda like the old gold rush days, people gambling, you could loose everything or make a million.. I wish, I got started right at the begging, but i am now keen to put a little investment into this and get it started. I prefer to invest in this rather than give my money to some Finance douche. little side projects are always fun..

As of 20.01.13 – The race is on to develop the first ASIC based mining rings.. These are hardware wired software into silicon, extremely fast and efficient to the point a single chip and can out-power a dozen or so powerful GPU computers. There is also FPGA devices that are available, but that is old technology. I have put my money on BitForce rig and here are the 3 contenders atm:

After booting up the Raspberry Pi with the SD card, I checked my router to find the DHCP IP address it gave the Pi.. As I am used a headless Pi. (i.e. I dont have a monitor) the next step is to ssh into it and configure it.. Setup RPi

sudo aptitude update
apt-get install git git-core
sudo aptitude install autoconf libtool libncurses-dev yasm curl libcurl4-openssl-dev libjansson-dev pkg-config libudev-dev
wget http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/bfgminer/2.10.3/bfgminer-2.10.3.tbz2
git clone https://github.com/luke-jr/bfgminer</em></em></em>
./autogen.sh
#./autogen.sh --enable-cpumining
# you can have multiply version of the minner from github, i use the above switch for testing mining with the RPi CPU, which would take about 1000 years to get a single bitcoin!!.. good to test passwords and options and pools
./configure
make
ls -l /dev/ttyUSB*
./bfgminer